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Jun 10, 2013

Game of Thrones: Season Three

By Josh Oakley

Game of Thrones is
a puzzle. Or it’s a map. Or, as our regular reviewer of the show insinuated,
it’s a mixtape. Whatever it is, it’s certainly not television. At least not
like any we’ve seen before. The show takes all of the elements that previous
programs have presented throughout the medium’s history. It doesn’t willfully
ignore those pieces, as Arrested
Development’s fourth season did. Rather it picks what it needs at any given
time and saves the rest for a later date. This episode will have an A-story,
that episode will feature a climax. The basics of storytelling are tampered
with, for better and worse. Wedding vow reference intended.

Looking at the overarching stories that Game of Thrones’ third season tells, coherent arcs can be found.
There’s Jamie’s transformation from charming villain to sympathetic anti-hero
(well, as close as a Lannister not named Tyrion is likely to get), which
receives much of the season’s best character development. There’s the fall and
further fall of Robb Stark and his army, culminating in one of the best
sequences the show has ever pulled off, if not the very pinnacle of its
achievements. Daenerys Targaryen freed slaves that she has assembled into a
seemingly unbeatable army, especially when coupled with dragons. It’s on that
note the season chooses to end, and as Paul
Krueger touched on in his review, it doesn’t exactly feel like the right
moment to send viewers off with. He thinks it too small, especially compared to
other cliffhangers the show could have offered. I, as a non-reader knowing
little that will happen in the future, thought the scene, while well-made,
didn’t serve in any real way as a culmination of the season that preceded it.

Here lies the main distinction between most of television
and Game of Thrones. I don’t want to
call it a flaw, rather a unique attribute. The formatting of Game of Thrones does have many precedents,
namely the soap opera. That genre also utilizes interlocking yet distinct
storylines, where one character may not get properly explored for a number of
episodes. The main difference of course (besides quality, and dragons), is that
the traditional soap runs for five episodes a week all year round, whereas we
get ten episodes of this show a year. That means that when a character only
appears in half of the season's outings, and only does something of note in two or
three of those, it can be difficult to leave an impact.

Again, this sounds too harsh. It so happens that almost
every character leaves their unique fingerprint on the show by virtue of its
incredible acting, writing and directing. Though Daenerys only appeared in one
scene tonight, the performances, and the sheer scope of the camera-work allowed
for it to not simply be another cog in the overall plot’s machine. But, to go
back to the point raised before, it hardly serves as a capper for a series of
ten episodes. Thinking on every character and every story raised this year, I
struggle to imagine anybody or place deserving of the final scene. Deserving in
a narrative sense, of course, not a qualitative one. Previous seasons eluded
this problem by putting an image so striking on screen. This one ends on a
high, important note, sure, but it doesn’t touch the reveal of dragons or White
Walkers. It relies on a more emotional beat, one that lands mainly for Emilia
Clarke’s performance. But, again, it lands as a scene, not as a period (or
ellipses, however you choose to imagine season finales).

Game of Thrones
has never seemed all that concerned with the placement of its material, though.
Sure, you put the Red Wedding at the end, and you don’t start with Daenerys
burning a town to the ground. There is a sense that the explosions happen at
the end, but not much beyond that (as long as, it should be clarified, we’re
not talking about “Blackwater”, which breaks the show’s rules by conforming
more to television structure). Characters and individual storylines build, with
great purpose, but the episode itself loses much of its meaning. You could,
were it not for chronological story telling, swap many scenes between episodes
and still have the same complete package. Maybe this is untrue to an extent,
but by and large stories seem thrown together so climaxes can be punched at the
right time in one arc and reacted to by a character halfway across Westeros.
Structure is purely for narrative purpose, not thematic, or even, really,
emotional reasoning. Certain scenes may seem jarring in the context of their
neighbors (as the Arya/Jon Snow companion piece showed tonight), and that’s
probably the only recognizable flaw found in this system.

By and large, Game of
Thrones works. I had various issues with various scenes throughout the
season, and the structure as a whole has often thrown me for a loop (especially
when placed next to its Sunday night partner, Mad Men, a show that lives consistently through its short
story-esque episodes). The way that Game
of Thrones functions means that it lives and dies by virtue of individual
sequences, rather than any whole of episode or season. Now this idea is joined by Game
of Thrones as a narrative whole, but Brandon
Nowalk and Todd VanDerWerff handled this idea perfectly at The A.V. Club
last week, so I’ll leave that larger picture to them for now. That’s a
fascinating conversation to have, but I’m more curious here how Game of Thrones works as television in
units rather than as a whole.

Pushing last season’s “Blackwater” aside, I find it
difficult to imagine an episode of Game
of Thrones ending up on my year-end “best of” list. “Rains of Castamere” is
the closest the show came this season, but the Bran material in the episode, while
not horrible, keeps the episode from being wholly great. It’s not that great episodes can’t juggle disparate tones, rather that when one ball is dropped
that cannot be ignored despite what great triumph may occur later on. When
every scene on Game of Thrones is its
own piece of art, the season can be harder to diagnose for quality. In this
case, and the case of seasons one and two, the good scenes outweigh the bad.
But if a show were to take the structure that Game of Thrones sets forth and do it poorly, well it would end up
being one of the worst shows on television. That would stem from it lacking quality not
just as piecemeal, but those chunks not resulting in a climax or any
episode-building tale.

This all sounds more negative than I mean it. When you see
the grade below, you’ll know how much I truly loved this season of television,
and the ones that came before it. I’m not interested in trashing on Game of Thrones. Instead, I find it
fascinating, as a step sideways for the medium. That is to say that I do not
consider it more or less good due to its framework. It’s another way of doing
business, but it’s an intriguing way, and one that here, at least, pays off
greatly. I’m not even necessarily referring to the rewatching/mystery aspect
discussed in The A.V. Club article linked above. I mean that few shows can pull
of the utter devastation of the season finale’s scene between Tyrion and Cersei.
And shows more preoccupied with building an episode with thematic consistency or
dovetailing plots may never attempt such a moment. Neither way is inherently
good or bad, but Game of Thrones proves
that this format can heighten emotion and intrigue in terrific new ways.